In the first half, activist, webmaster, and talk show host Michael Rivero joined John B. Wells for a conversation about how the U.S. government manipulates information to generate support for military conflicts and the financial factors fueling these wars. "We're fed this constant diet, by government and corporate media, basically telling us what will get us to do what they want us to do," he observed. However, Rivero pointed to the barrage of media reports concerning WMDs in Iraq, which convinced many Americans to support the war, as a potential watershed moment, since it exposed this manipulation on a grand scale.

The driving force behind these "military adventures," Rivero said, is a desperate attempt by the banking cartel to maintain the dollar as the world's reserve currency. To that end, he noted that both Iraq and Libya tried to stop using the dollar which led to the subsequent US invasions of those countries. Chillingly, Rivero warned that China and Russia are "digging their heels in" and seem poised to introduce their own international currencies which would challenge the dollar. As a result, he lamented, "we face the real risk of a nuclear war to prop up this paper dollar." Even if such a conflict can be avoided, Rivero suggested that, ultimately, the US government could "collapse from within" under the weight of financial mismanagement much like the Soviet Union.